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Seeing as the screenshots are from Gnome, I'd be surprised if they used X11, considering Gnome's future is on Wayland. Not to mention the irony of shipping a "secure phone" with X11...

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I still feel like being tied to X would be better than being tied to android. I use X11 on my laptop as do most people I know. Is it really that hard to just not run apps that you don't trust? There isn't that much out there that isn't built by a fairly popular open source project and is worth using.

With X11, an exploit in any GUI application can be turned into a privilege escalation vulnerability. On Wayland, to achieve the same, an exploit in a GUI application would need to exploit another application running with higher privileges to escalate.

Not running apps you don't trust is an overly simplistic security model, and completely ignores exploits.

X has been able to run rootless with KMS-based drivers for a while now.

An exploit in a Wayland app gets you just as far as an exploit in an X app connected to a modern X server.

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